This is once again a quite general observation, but I hope this time the implications will be more immediately applicable to the monastery. It starts with an article I found on Tilly’s homenode. The thesis of the article is that in telecommunication connectivity is much more important than content delivery. They prove that by presenting numbers on money people spent on using telecommunication media for private information exchange and for viewing/listening/reading content made by professionals. The numbers are convincing – but actually this is quite common sense that the public part of information exchange between humans is just a small fraction of the private information exchange.

In a healthy society the ratio of private and public communication must be in favor of private. It is the way human societies have been acting for thousands of years. This quite obvious truth is not used by people trying to build online communities. Perl Monks is not an exception here – although with Emessage System (Chatterbox and private messages) it seems to head in the write direction. I believe the EMessage System should be made more usable.

This is the reason why I ++ed the /msg to [author] of the [node] node, and was really disappointed to see it with a –3 reputation (it wasn’t until yesterday that I found the right argument in favor of this new feature). Above I presented a general reasoning why I believe we need this kind of functionality at PM – here I will present some more concrete arguments. First I know that technically it is not something really different from typing “/msg author_of_the_node The message …” into the Chatterbox, the difference is only in the comfort of using it. It is obvious that for the "social chitchat" the usage barrier needs to be really low. The most important role of this mechanism would be feedback for the author. It would be a more personal addition to the reputation points. This would free the public from reading the abundance of “me too” messages, while providing the author with the feeling that he has wrote something useful for others.

In reply to Public and private communication by zby

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